In literature regionalism refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features, such as dialect, customs, history, and
landscape
, of a particular region (also called "local colour"). The
setting
is particularly important in regional literature and the "locale is likely to be rural and/or provincial."
[1]
Development
[
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Novelists
[
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]
Thomas Hardy
's (1840?1928) novels can be described as regional because of the way he makes use of these elements in relation to a part of the West of England, that he names
Wessex
. On the other hand, it seems much less appropriate to describe
Charles Dickens
(1812?1870) as a regional novelist of
London
and the south of England.
John Cowper Powys
has been seen as a successor to
Thomas Hardy
, and
Wolf Solent
,
A Glastonbury Romance
(1932), along with
Weymouth Sands
(1934) and
Maiden Castle
(1936), are often referred to as his
Wessex
novels.
[2]
As with Hardy's novels, the
landscape
plays a major role in Powys's works, and an elemental philosophy is important in the lives of his characters. Powys's first novel
Wood and Stone
was dedicated to Thomas Hardy.
[3]
Maiden Castle
, the last of the Wessex novels, is set in
Dorchester
, Thomas Hardy's
Casterbridge
, and which he intended to be a "rival" to Hardy's
Mayor of Casterbridge
.
[4]
Mary Butts
was a modernist novelist who works are also associated with the idea of Wessex. "Like
[John Cowper] Powys
, she found a key to both personal and national identity by tuning into the deep history of the Dorset landscape [with emphasis on] sacred places and folk traditions".
[5]
The regional novel is generally seen as originating with
Maria Edgeworth
and
Walter Scott
, but their regions are hardily "comparable to Hardy's Wessex, Blackmore's Exmoor, or Arnold Bennett's potteries, [... because] they are nations."
[6]
The term has also been used, in the past, disparagingly, especially with regard to
women writers
, as a synonym for minor writing.
[7]
Other writers that have been characterized as regional novelists, are the
Bronte sisters
from
West Yorkshire
. In 1904, novelist
Virginia Woolf
visited their birthplace
Haworth
and published an account in
The Guardian
on 21 December. She remarked on the symbiosis between the village and the Bronte sisters. She wrote: "Haworth expresses the Brontes; the Brontes express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell".
[8]
Mary Webb
(1881?1927),
Margiad Evans
(1909?1958) and
Geraint Goodwin
(1903?1942), are associate with the Welsh border region.
George Eliot
(1801?1886), on the other hand, is particularly associated with the rural English Midlands, whereas
Arnold Bennett
(1867?1931) is the novelist of the
Potteries
in
Staffordshire
, or the "Five Towns", (actually six) that now make-up
Stoke-on-Trent
.
R. D. Blackmore
(1825?1900), was one of the most famous English novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century, and he shared with
Thomas Hardy
a Western England background and a strong sense of regional setting in his works.
[9]
Noted for his eye for and sympathy with nature, critics of the time described this as one of the most striking features of his writings. He may be said to have done for
Devon
what
Sir Walter Scott
did for the Highlands and Hardy for
Wessex
. However, Blackmore is now remembered for one work,
Lorna Doone
.
Catherine Cookson
(1906 ? 1998), who wrote about her deprived youth in
South Tyneside
,
County Durham
was one United Kingdom's most widely read novelists in the twentieth century.
Sid Chaplin
(1916?1986) is another writer from
North-east England
, who wrote, amongst other things,
The Day of the Sardine
, published in 1961, which is set in a working-class community in
Newcastle upon Tyne
,
North Tyneside
at the very beginning of the 1960s.
Poets
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Amongst poets there is
William Wordsworth
(1770?1850), and the other
Lake Poets
, while the poet
William Barnes
(1801?1886) is seen as primarily a
Dorset
poet, especially because of his use of Dorset
dialect
.
John Clare
(1793 ? 1864) was commonly known as "the
Northamptonshire
Peasant Poet". His formal education was brief, his other employment and class-origins were lowly. Clare resisted the use of the increasingly standardised English grammar and
orthography
in his poetry and prose, alluding to political reasoning in comparing "grammar" (in a wider sense of orthography) to tyrannical government and slavery, personifying it in jocular fashion as a "bitch".
[10]
He wrote in his Northamptonshire dialect, introducing local words to the literary canon such as "pooty" (snail), "lady-cow" (
ladybird
), "crizzle" (to crisp) and "throstle" (
song thrush
).
Alfred Tennyson
(1809?1892) has been identified as a
Lincolnshire
poet, while
Philip Larkin
(1922?1985) is principally associated with the
city of Hull
.
Basil Bunting
's (1900?1985) semi-autobiographal poem
Briggflatts
can be read as a meditation on the limits of life and a celebration of
Northumbrian
culture and dialect, as symbolised by events and figures like the doomed Viking King
Eric Bloodaxe
.
[11]
Ondaatje Prize
[
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The Royal Society of Literature
Ondaatje Prize
is an annual literary award given by the
Royal Society of Literature
. The £10,000 award is given for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry which evokes the "spirit of a place", and which is written by someone who is a citizen of or who has been resident in the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.
[12]
The prize bears the name of its benefactor
Christopher Ondaatje
and incorporates the
Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize
which was presented up to 2002 for regional fiction.
Other British regional novelists
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]
Other British regional novelists:
[13]
See also
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References
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- ^
J. A. Cuddon,
A Dictionary of Literary Terms
. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p. 560.
- ^
Herbert Williams,
John Cowper Powys
. Bridgend, Wales: Seren,1997, p. 94.
- ^
New York Arnold Shaw, 1915.
- ^
Morine Krissdottir's,
Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys
. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007. p. 312.
- ^
Jonathan Bate, "A good, old-fashioned modernist".
The Telegraph
, 26 January 2003
[1]
- ^
Liz Bellamy,
Regionalism and Nationalism: Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and the definition of Britishness
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.54.
- ^
Robin Inboden. "Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction (review)."
Modern Fiction Studies
34.4 (1988): pp.682-683.
- ^
Lemon, Charles (1996).
Early Visitors to Haworth, from Ellen Nussey to Virginia Woolf
. Bronte Society. pp. 124?125.
ISBN
9780950582962
.
- ^
Michael Millgate,
Thomas Hardy: A Biography
(New York: Random House, 1982), 179, 249.
- ^
Asked by his cousin and publisher
John Taylor
to correct a passage for publication, he answered: "I may alter but I cannot mend grammer in learning is like tyranny in government--confound the bitch ill never be her slave & have a vast good mind not to alter the verse in question..." (Letter 133). See
Storey, Edward, ed. (1985).
The Letters of John Clare
. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 231.
ISBN
9780198126690
.
- ^
Poets' Graves
[2]
; Basil Bunting (intr. By Richard Caddell), "Complete Poems". New Directions, 2003. p. 60.
- ^
"RSL Ondaatje Prize home page"
.
Royal Society of Literature
. Archived from
the original
on 2010-04-05
. Retrieved
2010-01-16
.
- ^
Oxford English Literary History
, vol. 10, ed. Chris Baldick. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 172.
- ^
R. G. Burnett, 'Hocking, Silas Kitto (1850?1935)’, rev. Sayoni Basu,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
,
Oxford University Press
, 2004; online edn, May 2006
accessed 16 December 2008
Bibliography
[
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]
- Bellamy, Liz,
Regionalism and Nationalism: Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and the definition of Britishness
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Bentley, Phyllis Eleanor,
The English regional novel
1894?1977. London: Allen & Unwin, [1941].
- Keith, W. J.,
Regions of the imagination: the development of British rural fiction
. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, c1988.
- Pite, Ralph,
Hardy's geography: Wessex and the regional novel
. Palgrave, 2002.
- Radford, Andrew D.,
Mapping the Wessex novel: landscape, history and the parochial in British literature
, 1870?1940. London; New York: Continuum International Pub., 2010.
- Snell, K. D. M.,
The regional novel in Britain and Ireland
. 1800?1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998;
- and
The Bibliography of Regional Fiction in Britain and Ireland
: 1800?2000. Aldershott: Ashgate, 2002.